The Academy is building a bunker that could survive the death of ABC

March 7, 2023 7:17 AM

Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico write Numlock Awards, a Substack newsletter about "the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night". Recently, Hickey wrote about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is building toward a billion-dollar endowment for its museum and other operations, saying the Academy has changed itself "into something more akin to a university from a balance sheet perspective."
posted by Etrigan (13 comments total)

Planning for a world without linear tv seems like a very sensible play-- sounds like the people managing the Academy are doing a much better job than the people picking the Oscar winners.
posted by box at 8:06 AM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't keep up with movies & so experienced a good 1.5 seconds of being pretty excited that someone had made a film called Elvis v. the Whale
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:28 AM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Well it is an academy. It's right there in the name.
posted by slogger at 9:32 AM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

slogger beat me to it.
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:55 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

That museum is the most “this meeting could have been an email” I have ever felt about a museum.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:18 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The premise that the decline of linear television will hit the profitability of the Oscar awards show is not well considered. In the thin-tail world of streaming, truly first-rate broad-appeal live content is doing better, not worse. That's basically the NFL, the Premiership, a handful of other ultra-prime sporting events ... and the Oscars.
posted by MattD at 10:33 AM on March 7, 2023

In the thin-tail world of streaming, truly first-rate broad-appeal live content is doing better, not worse.

How does that square with the assertion that Oscar viewership has been in decline? 2022 was better than 2021 but that's still the second-worst audience on record, and the overall trend is not good.

There's potentially an argument to be made that hosting the Oscars on one or more streaming services means it can still be successful, but it's not clear to me that that means the Academy can continue to rely on paydays similar to what they currently get from ABC. Not only is the business case fundamentally different for streamers, we're also going through what feels like a contraction period, with streaming services cutting programming and shifting away from aggressive expansion of their subscriber bases towards improving profitability. That said, 2028 is a long ways away when it comes to business, so maybe by then the Oscars on YouTube or Netflix/Disney+/whatever would be a more obvious business play.
posted by chrominance at 10:58 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

All of those are events that are mostly famous for being famous in our winner take all attention economy.

I'll get my coat. It's the one hanging under the fedora.
posted by ocschwar at 10:58 AM on March 7, 2023

By "doing better" I mean "getting paid more by licensees." Audiences are mostly declining in absolute terms for everything, but less so for the ultra-premium content, and the price-per-viewer is rising for those things because there are just so few of them.

I do think that the Oscars are going to have to do some things to become more audience friendly over time, like the baseball rule changes etc. Probably make the awards a bit more global and definitely doing something to move the nominee lists away from the eat-your-spinach to the populist.
posted by MattD at 11:22 AM on March 7, 2023

Does this mean they can stop doing weird shit to the format to pretend it isn’t an awards show/hide the awards they think we’ll find boring/chop out people actually accepting the awards, etc ? Because I would like that.
posted by Artw at 11:53 AM on March 7, 2023

I agree it’s probably a good idea to disaggregate the “linear TV” portion of viewership decline with the “movies are changing” portion, and I think most people who really care have a pretty good idea of that breakdown. The Oscars have basically been reinventing themselves to Stay Cool With The Kids since year 1, and there’s an observable shift back and forth over the years as corrections are made. I think the real existential risk isn’t precisely an “old people’s taste” problem - the big winners last year were CODA and Dune - but rather that the Oscars, like all awards shows, assumes a monoculture in terms of fandom and distribution, and that’s less true than ever. Put simply, the Academy is under duress not because of changes in television but because of changes in film production.
That being said, the movies are always going to be a place of supreme self-congratulation and I don’t see festivals and awards shows going anywhere in particular. The idea that it becomes more like the Met Gala and less like a weird zombie variety show feels inevitable. The people who really care will still watch, trust me.
posted by q*ben at 2:23 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The long and the short of it is we have a glut of content, it's non-linear, so we don't really have a shared cultural zeitgeist of the years before. When I was growing up in the 1980s it was whatever was on three channels of TV, what we had previously recorded to VHS, or going out to the video store and/or live movie. So of course you're going to watch whatever the most appropriate thing is on linear TV at that time. Is it some sitcom? Probably. And millions of people are probably going to be watching it along with you because there's not a lot of other media choices available. If you wanted to engage socially it was to people in your immediate vicinity (work/school/hyper local friends) and whether you liked it or not, you had to engage in sort of a cultural experience shibboleth if you wanted any sort of participation with that group. You watched the Academy Awards because everyone else watched the Academy Awards and it's all people talked about the week after it even if it was just cringey, self-congratulatory pablum.

Now? We have unlimited access to non-linear content. We have access to communities beyond communities on every conceivable subject from all over the world. There's no such thing as mainstream anymore. Some people are still trying to pretend there is but the new media world order is here and it has very little cultural inertia. We basically have (and I hate this word) fandoms, for better or for worse, instead. You wanna watch some Youtuber show how rivers move? You do you, fam. There's a niche. Don't like the watercooler conversation about last night's episode of premium cable show de jure? Who cares, you're probably having a better conversation talking online about whatever you're actually interested in to some other people anyway.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:04 PM on March 7, 2023

The idea that it becomes more like the Met Gala and less like a weird zombie variety show feels inevitable. The people who really care will still watch, trust me.

Nerd superbowl.
posted by Artw at 5:01 PM on March 7, 2023